Specify the size of sectors in bytes. Valid sector size values are 256, 512, 1024, 2048 and 4096 bytes per sector. If omitted, mkntfs attempts to determine the sector-size automatically and if that fails a default of 512 bytes per sector is used.

Will this tool on Samsung's site do anything other than format the drive in the same way doing

mkntfs -s 4K /dev/sdb1

would do?

To be specific, I'm intending to use this drive on a machine that will primarily run Windows XP, but I'd rather boot into Linux/BSD and format the disk manually than have bloated software. I do want to have the new AF style sectors though -- that's essential.

So if I did the command above (or another command available on Linux/BSD), would it have exactly the same effect as using the advanced format tool?

Thank you very much! I am out of votes for today, but will upvote it at midnight tonight. This is exactly what I was looking for :)
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Matthieu CartierDec 22 '10 at 20:16

Unmarked just briefly -- it seems that these links only cover how to create extX partitions that are aligned, I'm wanting to create an NTFS partition (just noticing that 83 is a Linux partition type). Any ideas?
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Matthieu CartierDec 22 '10 at 20:21

Wait, is it correct that doing fdisk -H 224 -S 56 /dev/sda and then using mkntfs would do it?
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Matthieu CartierDec 22 '10 at 20:29

Yes, it doesn't matter how you format it (ext, ntfs, fat, etc), all that matters is that the partition itself was created on a 4KB boundary. Sector size is something else, and 4KB should probably be the minimum sector size, but bigger might be better for performance reasons -- You'd have to do more research, I'd probably just use whatever the defaults are.
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davrDec 23 '10 at 2:08

The important part is that your partitions are created aligned on a 4 KB boundary, not the sector size of the formatted partition. By default, Windows XP doesn't create partitions with that kind of alignment, and the drives have to do a read-modify-write operation across 2 sectors internally for every write operation.

A vendor's tool will make sure that your partitions are aligned, and modify them to be if they aren't already. Windows Vista and 7 will create properly aligned partitions. I'm not sure about how Linux/BSD tools behave, but I imagine recent tools will work correctly.